Cooking the food in front of you

An idea I picked up from sitting in on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's classes is that of "cooking the food in front of you, instead of showing you the prepared dish." He uses this phrase when he is going to do some Mathematica programming right there, live, in front of the class.

This type of teaching inspired me to write a Python harness for comparing different hash functions in front of my class. I don't think any of them had ever seen an instructor do this before. And I am pretty sure they gained from seeing it.

It's not as anxiety-free (for the lecturer) as "showing them the prepared dish," but I think the students learn more from this form of presentation.